Contents

Biography

Youth

Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer and his wife,
Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's
childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November, 1847, in the
cathedral of Montevideo and that his mother died soon afterwards,
probably due to an epidemic. During 1851, as a five-year-old, he
experienced the end of the eight-year siege of
Montevideo in the Argentine-Uruguayan war. Ducasse was brought
up to speak three languages: French, Spanish and English.

During October 1859, at the age of thirteen, Isidore was sent to
high school in France by his father. He was trained in French
education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. During 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée
Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended
classes in rhetoric and philosophy (under and uppergreat). He
excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his
thinking and style. Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan
Poe, and particularly favored Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam
Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de
Musset, and Baudelaire. During school he was fascinated
by Racine and Corneille,
and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. According to
his schoolmate, Paul Lespès, he performed obvious folly "by
self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible
death images" in an essay. After graduation he lived in Tarbes,
where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his
guardian, and decided to become a writer.

Years in
Paris

After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse
settled in Paris at the end of 1867. He began studies at the École
Polytechnique, only to cease them one year later. Continuous
allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to dedicate
himself completely to his writing. He lived in the "Intellectual
Quarter", in a hotel in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires,
where he worked intensely on the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror. It is
possible that he started this work before his passage to
Montevideo, and also continued the work during his ocean
journey.

Ducasse was a frequent visitor to nearby libraries, where he
read Romantic
literature, as well as scientific works and encyclopaedias. The
publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young
man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious" and reported that
Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming
wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses
to the sounds".

During late 1868 Ducasse published-- anonymously and at his own
expense-- the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror (Chant
premier, par ***), a booklet of thirty-two pages which is
considered by many to be a bold, taboo-defying poem concerning pain
and cruelty.

On November 10, 1868, Isidore sent a letter to writer Victor Hugo, in which
he included two copies of the first canto, and asked for a
recommendation for further publication. A new edition of the first
canto appeared at the end of January, 1869, in the anthology
Parfums de l'Ame in Bordeaux. Here Ducasse used his
pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont for the first time. His chosen name
was based on the character of Latréaumont from a popular 1837
French gothic novel by Eugène Sue, which featured a haughty and
blasphemous anti-hero similar in some ways to Isidore's Maldoror.
The title was probably paraphrased as l'autre Amon (the
other Amon),
although it can also be interpreted as representing "l'autre Amont"
(the other side of the river).

A total of six cantos were to be published during late 1869, by
Albert Lacroix
in Brussels, who had also published Eugène Sue. The book was
already printed when Lacroix refused to distribute it to the
booksellers as he feared prosecution for blasphemy or obscenity. Ducasse considered that this was
because "life in it is painted in too harsh colors" (letter to the
banker Darasse from March 12, 1870).

Ducasse urgently asked Auguste Poulet
Malassis, who had published Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du
mal (The Flowers of Evil) during 1857, to send copies of
his book to the critics. They alone could judge "the commence of a
publication which will see its end only later, and after I will
have seen mine." He tried to explain his position, and even offered
to change some "too strong" points for coming editions:

I have written of evil as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A.
de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done. Naturally I drew
register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in
the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in
order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the
remedy. Thus it is always, after all, the good which is the
subject, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than
that of the old school. (...) Is that the evil? No, certainly
not.

—letter from October 23,
1869.

Poulet Malassis announced the forthcoming publication of the
book the same month in his literary magazine Quarterly Review
of Publications Banned in France and Printed Abroad. Otherwise
few people took heed of the book. Only the Bulletin du
Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire noticed it during May, 1870;
"the book will probably find a place under the bibliographic
curiosities".

Death

During spring 1869, Ducasse frequently changed his address, from
Rue du Faubourg Montmartre 32 to Rue Vivienne 15,
then back to Rue Faubourg Montmartre, where he lodged in a
hotel at number 7. While still awaiting the distribution of his
book, Ducasse worked on a new text, a follow-up to his
"phenomenological description of evil", in which he wanted to sing
of good. The two works would form a whole, a dichotomy of good and
evil. The work, however, remained a fragment.

During April and June, 1870, Ducasse published the first two
installments of what was obviously meant to be the preface to the
planned "chants of the good" in two small brochures, Poésies I and
II. This time he published by his real name, discarding his
pseudonym. He differentiated the two parts of his work with the
terms philosophy and
poetry, announced that the
beginning of a struggle against evil was the reversal of his other
work:

I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by
hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith,
sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty.

At the same time Ducasse took texts by famous authors and
cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized for
Poésies:

Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress.
It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions,
eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.

On 19 July 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, and
after his capture, Paris was besieged on September 17, a situation
with which Ducasse was already familiar, from his early childhood
in Montevideo. The living conditions worsened rapidly during the
siege, and according to the owner of the hotel he lodged at,
Ducasse became sick with a "bad fever".

Lautréamont died at the age of 24 on November 24, 1870, at 8:00
am in his hotel. On his death certificate "no further information"
was given. Since many were afraid of epidemics while Paris was
besieged, Ducasse was buried the next day after a service in Notre
Dame de Lorette in a provisional grave at the Cemetière
du Nord. During January 1871, his body was put into another
grave elsewhere.

In his Poésies Lautréamont announced: "I will leave no
memoirs", and as such, the life of the creator of the "Les Chants
de Maldoror" remains for the most part unknown.

Les
Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror is based on a character called
Maldoror, a figure of
unrelenting evil who has forsaken God and mankind. The book combines a violent
narrative with vivid and often surrealistic imagery.

The critic Alex De Jonge writes, "Lautreamont forces his readers
to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent
acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and
make them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all
the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake."
(De Jonge, p. 1)

There is a wealth of Lautréamont criticism, interpretation and
analysis in French (including an esteemed biography by
Jean-Jacques Lefrère), but little in English.

Lautréamont's writing has many bizarre scenes, vivid imagery and
drastic shifts in tone and style. There is much "black
humor"; De Jonge argues that Maldoror reads like "a sustained
sick joke." (De Jonge, p. 55)

Surrealism

In 1917, French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy
of Les Chants de Maldoror in the mathematics section of a
small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had
been admitted. In his memoirs Soupault wrote:

To the light of a candle which was permitted to me, I began the
reading. It was like an enlightenment. In the morning I read the
Chants again, convinced that I had dreamed... The day
after André Breton came to visit me. I gave him the book and asked
him to read it. The following day he brought it back, equally
enthusiastic as I had been.

Due to this find, Lautréamont was introduced to the Surrealists. Soon they
called him their prophet. As one of the poète
maudits (accursed poets), he was elevated to the
Surrealist Panthéon beside Baudelaire and Rimbaud,
and acknowledged as a direct precursor to Surrealism. André Gide regarded
him—even more than Rimbaud—as the most significant figure, as the
"gate-master of tomorrow's literature," meriting Breton and
Soupault "to have recognized and announced the literary and
ultra-literary importance of the amazing Lautréamont."

Louis Aragon
and Breton discovered the only copies of the Poésies in
the National Library of
France and published the text in April and May 1919 in two
sequential editions of their magazine Literature. In 1925
a special edition of the Surrealist magazine Le Disque
Vert was dedicated to Lautréamont, under the title "Le cas
Lautréamont" (The Lautréamont case). It was the 1927 publication by
Soupault and Breton that assured him a permanent place in French
literature and the status of patron saint in the Surrealist
movement. In 1940 Breton incorporated him into his Anthology of
Black Humour.

The title of an object by American artist Man Ray, called L'énigme d'Isidore
Ducasse (The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse) created in 1920,
contains a reference to a famous line in the 6th canto. Lautréamont
describes a young boy as "beautiful as the chance meeting on a
dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!". Similarly,
Breton often used this line as an example of Surrealist
dislocation.

Influence on
others

Guy Debord
developed a section from Poésies II as thesis 207 in
The Society of the
Spectacle. The thesis covers plagiarism as a necessity and
how it is implied by progress. It explains that plagiarism embraces
an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false
idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Translations

Maldoror (and the Complete works of the Comte de
Lautréamont); Exact Change; Cambridge, MA ; 1994 ;
Translation into English by Alexis Lykiard with updated notes and
bibliography by Lykiard, as well ; ISBN 1-878972-12-X